The role of perception in reading has been underestimated because it is primarily the perception of letter form (what is it?) that has been investigated. Recent studies show that good and poor readers can be differentiated at the level of individual letter identification NOT by form perception, but rather by their ability to use a specific form of redundancy called spatial redundancy. Since spatial redundancy has not yet been systematically investigated as a variable in letter identification, the first studies will use both skilled adult readers and good and poor sixth grade readers to examine the role of spatial redundancy in conjunnction with retinal location, item discriminability, and item confuseability. These first studies will employ a modified version of the visual search paradigm and should contribute useful data for the more general problem of microprocesses involved in letter indentification. Spatial redundancy is dependent upon the perception of where a letter is positioned within a discrete linear array. The relevance to the reading process of the perception of spatial location within a multi-letter configuration has received little research effort. Therefore, additional studies will use a probe technique to explore variables associated with the encoding and retention of spatial order information in good and poor sixth grade readers. From the combined studies, it should be possible to identify an important subset of spatial redundancy rules that can be substituted for the larger set found in printed English for future remediation purposes.